Sect Year 4 · third month · day 26 · Qerrin flats and the inn above the salt-pans
Fog lay on the water at dawn, so thick that the bow lamp had to be lit to find the rail. Lin stood at it with his hands in his coat and waited. For nineteen days the sea had been the whole world, grey and moving, with the sky sitting on top of it like a lid. Now the fog began to thin. The water went from grey to brown beneath it, and somewhere ahead a shape rose out of the mist and was land.
Qerrin’s coast was low. It ran away on either hand as a band of pale mud, and the tide was out so far that the flats shone in the early light, the grey of wet slate. Old wooden stakes ran out across them from the shingle, black and leaning, marking a path that had been there longer than anyone aboard could say. The stakes stopped short of the water’s edge like a sentence with no full stop.
Gao Wen had come to the bow before the lamp was lit. He stood with his weight on his good leg and his stick hooked over the rail, and he didn’t speak until the anchor went down with a splash that carried far across the still water.
